Marketing automation is quickly evolving, much like the marketing industry itself. The Marketing Automation Times recently identified three marketing automation trends to watch this year and explained how they relate to marketing automation.
Social media-driven personalization
The rise of social media sites has facilitated more personalized communication between consumers and companies. The trend is expected to continue, as the social networking craze shows no sign of abating. In March, Twitter released statistics on its blog that revealed the site’s more than 140 million active users were generating over 340 million tweets per day—and the microblogging website isn’t even the largest social network in the world, as that title goes to Facebook.
In response to this trend, “marketers must produce marketing automation campaigns that are even more personalized, pertinent and timely,” the news source noted.
Conveniently, this process is being facilitated organically. Marketers are likely to use their marketing automation systems for more complex tasks as they become more familiar with them.
The shift from traditional to revenue-based metrics
Marketing automation systems will increasingly be required to provide more advanced and detailed reports as traditional reporting metrics, such as page views and click rates, give way to more revenue-focused numbers.
“As 2012 progresses, marketers will be able … to see the value of their campaigns like never before, and gain insight to how marketing impacts revenue across the board,” the media outlet predicted.
With regard to marketing automation tools, the Times predicts that they will be used to make marketing “less of a guessing game and more of a measurable science.”
Distributing promotional content across channels
As consumers fall victim to what Target Marketing Magazine characterizes as “email fatigue”—the disengagement that grows out of online advertisers repeatedly targeting prospects’ email inboxes—there will be a growing need to diversify across channels in increasingly creative ways. From a marketing automation perspective, systems need to be able to integrate with a multitude of channels at once. This will facilitate cohesive posting and monitoring in a way that negates siloing as companies tune in to more social media channels such as Pinterest and Google+.
“Given that many businesses now maintain five or more separate social media channels, a marketing automation system that enables the marketer to both post to all outlets simultaneously and track activity on each outlet separately becomes invaluable,” the Times notes.